M 42 / NGC 1976

 

At a distance of about 1600 (or 1500) light years, the Orion nebula is the brightest diffuse nebula in the sky - visible to the naked eye, and a worthy object for telescopes of all sizes, from the smallest binoculars up to the largest ground-based observatories and the Hubble Space Telescope. It is the main part of a much larger cloud of gas and dust that extends well over 10 degrees, more than half of the constellation of Orion. The linear extent of this enormous cloud of no less than several hundred light years.

Copyright by Bernd Blaudzun